Amerika

It is funny how the most important things hide in plain sight. Humans tend to hate really important things because they do not change and they do not empower the individual. On the contrary, the really important stuff humbles the individual and reminds him that he is merely an actor playing a role.

For example, most of us serve some position in our community. We do not do it for ourselves, but when they need someone to chainsaw trees or install an operating system, they come to us. We benefit from the role, but only when we actually perform it to help others.

These roles reduce our individualism by orienting us toward reality instead of the self. Our only enjoyment comes from aiding things in reality. In this way, we are bonded to our world, but also get in touch with our inner self and the longings of our soul, instead of the outer self which craves acceptance and importance.

Important things hiding in plain sight are all around us. People fear talking about purpose, spirituality, culture, and even reason itself because these open up a can of worms and will make no one happy. They want to talk about stuff on the surface because it is like shopping, choosing one product over another and building an identity out of it.

The issue that all should be talking about but refuse to discuss is civilization collapse. The future of your civilization is a binary: it is either going up, or going down. There is no “hover in place” option or eternal stasis. You either keep pushing to be better (not “progress”) or you are becoming worse.

Read that paragraph out loud to kill any conversation.

No one will talk about civilization collapse because mentioning it requires that we assess where “we” are. For the last millennium, the answer has been that we in Western Civilization have been in accelerating collapse. If we face that, we have to either grow up and fight for something better, or give up and become broken people rationalizing failure.

Every issue however comes back to civilization collapse and at the core of it is biology, not just ethnic isolation which is necessary for survival, but internal quality of breeding so that we are not decaying into a mass of mutated and aimless genetics.

Civilization may be one of the oldest labor-enhancing devices invented by humankind. With civilization, the individual is surrounded by expertise. With civilization, whatever the individual produces can reach an audience and possibly endure. With civilization, knowledge accrues and culture flourishes, at least if done halfway correctly.

It is civilization that lets an ordinary man acquire the tools to make raw land into a prosperous farm, develop new computer software, write a symphony, pen a novel, design a spaceship, or build a mansion. With civilization we can have not just technology and prosperity, but enough free time to pursue wisdom and enjoyment of life.

When civilization is rising, it amplifies the good and suppresses the bad. At some point, it hits a peak of prosperity and people start treating it as an authority to rebel against. It replies by enforcing means-over-ends logic, namely spaghetti masses of rules, and people circumvent those, so decay accelerates.

The root of this failure is probably luxury. Given extra time and nutrition, good people do good things; bad people do bad things. Few are willing to look at removing the bad, orienting the whole toward the good, and promoting the good. Most are too busy rebelling against the system by taking whatever they can for themselves (individualism).

When you encounter questions like H-1Bs, social security, dual citizenship, and the like, the important question is not “is this consistent with what we are doing right now?” It is: will this move civilization upwards, or does this push it further downwards through the accelerating individualism of “progress”?

Tags: civilization collapse, collapse, decay, decline